By Yahya Birt

The emergence of “Islamophobia” as an English-language neologism could be dated to around 1991, although earlier occurrences can be found in Edward Said’s essay “Orientalism Reconsidered” in 1985 and from the early twentieth century in French.[1]  This emergence coincided with the moment when Muslim minorities become politically active in Western Europe, in the midst of religio-political revival in the Muslim world, and at the ending of the Cold War.  The parallels with the coining of anti-Semitism in Europe in 1879 are striking, occurring as it did after the legal emancipation of European Jewry and during their social assent at the height of European nationalism.  The Runnymede Trust report on Islamophobia in 1997 helped to internationalise the term, denoted by the fact that the United Nations made Islamophobia a theme at the 2001 Conference against Racism in Durban and held a further seminar in December 2004.  Today Google records over 600,000 references on the internet and nearly 4800 scholarly citations.

Yet, despite the term’s rising ubiquity, the editors of two forthcoming scholarly collections – S. Sayyid and Abdoolkarim Vakil’s Thinking Through Islamophobia and Maleiha Malik’s Anti-Muslim Prejudice in the West – recognise that Islamophobia and/or anti-Muslim prejudice remain controversial and curiously ill-defined terms.[2]  Both collections seem to make a virtue of multi-disciplinary and comparative approaches in attempting to remedy this – recognising that greater scholarly rigour may help to eliminate some of the vagaries and hence disputation around the concept.  In ways recognisable in their Jewish counterparts, Muslim intellectuals seem to wrestle over how much weight to give respectively to historical continuities or present-day discontinuities in patterns of prejudice.  For instance, Malik in her introduction argues “the topic of anti-Muslim prejudice in the West…has to be placed in its historical context by considering the extent to which the mediaeval period is a forerunner to contemporary forms of prejudice….”, while Sayyid asks what is to be gained by employing Islamophobia as a concept instead of racism or Orientalism?  What might prove productive, he suggests, is a series of reflections on the emergence of a very contested “Muslim question”.[3] Another forthcoming monograph by Chris Allen is equally concerned to address “whether Islamophobia can be seen as a continuum of historical anti-Muslimism or anti-Islamism, or whether Islamophobia is an entirely modern concept”.[4]

There is also the problem of etymology, or lexical deconstruction.  Some people see “Islam” plus “phobia” and define the term “Islamophobia” as the sum of its parts.  They object to the idea that a religion can’t be criticised without accusations of racism or that their well-founded rational objections should be recast as irrational or phobic.  Some critics therefore argue that “anti-Muslim prejudice” serves as a less contentious and clearer alternative than “Islamophobia” because essentially it’s people not ideas that need defending.  This would seem to ignore the findings of critical race theory which has charted the shift in emphasis from classical biological racism to cultural racism, including in Britain.[5]  This shift is not denied in Malik’s collection which, to the contrary, is concerned to chart the relation of ideas like secularism and liberalism to historical and contemporary manifestations of prejudice against Muslim persons. Malik’s preference for “anti-Muslim prejudice” is rather predicated on the argument that a focus on “prejudice”, which is at least subject to rational analysis, has more utility than a concentration on “phobia”, which is less amenable to such analysis and refers instead to deeper psychological roots and to the irrational.[6]

The other strategy is to recognise that “Islamophobia” itself, as Sayyid argues, can no longer be simply defined as “fear of Islam (and its cognates)”, and so, as it has wide currency, it should be made a sharper and more wide-ranging analytical tool.  In short, “Islamophobia” should become more than the sum of its etymological parts.  This point is well taken, and is one that I have some sympathy for. After all, “Islamophobia” as a neologism takes its inspiration from “homophobia” and “xenophobia” – which no-one defines so narrowly as to exclude prejudicial rationales – rather than from the fear of the outdoors, enclosed spaces or spiders.  And whichever term is preferred – anti-Muslim prejudice verses Islamophobia – advocates of both terms recognise that there is a complex combination of biological and cultural racism at play here.[7]  Perhaps what is at stake here is not so much one’s preferred choice of terminology but one’s politics, with its attendant questions about tactics, strategies, alliances and goals and, therefore, rhetorical preferences.  Above and beyond that it is surely a healthier state of affairs that a more careful consideration of definitions serves the broader goal of enhancing critical theory in this neglected area.

A final point of more than passing interest is that all the three editors and several of the contributors are British Muslim intellectuals, academics or commentators.  It is tempting to speculate as to why this might be the case.  The first reason is that the pioneering intellectual and policy framing for Islamophobia was laid down in Britain – in the form of the Runnymede Trust reports of 1997 and 2004.[8]  This is reflected in the fact that nine out of the ten most cited scholarly references are by British academics.  A second point is that British Muslims like Khalida Khan, Maleiha Malik, Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood, Ziauddin Sardar, Bobby Sayyid and others did much to lead the debate on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice throughout the 1990s and 2000s; and this was an expression, perhaps, of the political confidence and dynamism of British Muslims more generally.  That Britain has led debate on the merits and demerits of the term “Islamophobia” is also reflected in the fact that its most prominent critics – like Fred Halliday and Kenan Malik – have also been British.[9]  It therefore seems appropriate that these two serious attempts to give the term analytical credibility should have a British impetus as well.

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Tags: Europe, Islamophobia, Muslim, UK

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